Hubbard’s Games spot is an affront to fairness
Quietly, and with minimum fanfare, the New Zealand Olympic Committee made an announcement this week that threatened to shake the Tokyo Games to their core. The weightlifter Laurel Hubbard was, it confirmed, “very likely” to be granted a quota spot by the Oceania federation, making her the first transgender Olympian in history. If it imagines that this is a cue for her to be celebrated as a trailblazer, it should think again. For hers is a presence in Japan that will draw frenzied consternation, sparking a necessary debate as to why one athlete’s ambition is being allowed to undermine the integrity of the female category in sport.
Hubbard is 43, and before transitioning to become Laurel lived, until the age of 35, as Gavin, the son of the former mayor of Auckland. She has spent more than four-fifths of her life fortified by all the physiological advantages of growing up male: large muscles, increased bone density, plus the explosive power essential for lifting the most substantial weights. She can harness all those residual effects of her development to crush any rivals who were born female.
At the 2018 Commonwealth Games, she began with a weight 7kg heavier than that of her nearest challenger. During the same competition, Hubbard suffered a dislocated elbow, which she feared would be a career-ending injury. It deprived her of the gold medal, but it protected weightlifting authorities from a blizzard of protest.
With Hubbard sidelined, the sport’s officials should have taken the chance to strengthen their own rules, to ward against the absurd situation of an athlete who was a man until 2012 being permitted to enter a female competition in a power-based event. Instead, in an effort either to appease the trans lobby or to make themselves appear enlightened, they have let her return. Her involvement in Tokyo looks likely to engulf the grandest stage of all.
How can there even be any pretence that Hubbard’s inclusion is consistent with the principle of a level playing field? Research carried out by World Rugby, an outlier as a global governing body that has banned transgender women from competing internationally, identifies a gap of 30 per cent between men and women in weightlifting ability.
“These differences are the result of biology,” the scientists’ summary declares. “Males have higher muscle mass, larger muscle cross-sectional area, longer levers (different skeleton), less fat mass, higher tendon stiffness and higher cardiovascular capacity (larger heart and lungs, more haemoglobin).” Hubbard absorbed all these benefits until her mid-30s, equipping her with a visibly different physique to her weightlifting peers. It is little wonder that in her early 40s, she is obliterating the field.
Women are not expected to dominate as weightlifters beyond 30, never mind 40. It does not take much to realise that her supremacy owes less to any quirk of longevity than to a body bulked up through 35 years through natural male hormones. But still no administrators have the gumption to block her, or to suggest that she is denying opportunities to women whose very physiology prevents them from reaching Hubbard’s standard. The arguments by Hubbard’s apologists boil down, consistently, to her rights, to the notion that she has some inviolable prerogative to win medals under the gender that she has chosen for herself. What this school of thought always neglects, though, are the rights of her rivals.
Hubbard has endured many caustic commentaries about her place in sport, but does not have a monopoly on struggle. Take Samoa’s Feagaiga Stowers, who had to settle for silver behind her at the 2019 Pacific Games. Stowers spent much of her teenage years living in a shelter, the survivor of sexual abuse. Should her background of oppression be deemed secondary to Hubbard’s? Certainly, she deserves better than to have her path to an Olympic gold impeded by an athlete with a huge biological head start. At a time when the International Olympic Committee should be doing everything in its gift to empower women, it risks achieving the precise opposite.
By degrees, the unease over Hubbard’s journey to the Games is mounting. It is a heartbreaking situation for many female weightlifters, who have trained their whole lives for these Olympics, but who find themselves crushed by the spineless refusal of officials to query Hubbard’s eligibility. The easiest solution, at this stage, might be just to let her turn up in Tokyo. Only then, perhaps, can the harshest light be shone on this absurd state of affairs, one that is an affront to female athletes everywhere and to the very concept of fairness.